Creative Remodeling Ideas: Untap Your Home’s Full Potential

Your home has been good to you. It’s provided you with a place to sleep, eat, and entertain friends. Maybe it’s even given you a place to raise a family. But you have to ask yourself: has my home

really

given me everything it can? Most likely it hasn’t. Chances are there’s still a lot of untapped potential in those walls, that ceiling, and underneath that staircase. Here are some creative remodeling techniques that can do everything from increasing storage space to decreasing cleaning time to really upping your home’s coolness factor.

Most likely there’s an avid reader, a wine connoisseur, or someone with a shoe fetish in your household—or maybe there’s all three. In other words, you could really use more storage space! If you have a two-story home, the solution might be right under your feet. Why not turn the space underneath your staircase into a bookshelf or a wine rack? Or if you are a dog lover, why not build Fido his own little dog house under there—that way you won’t wake up your household with a squeak when you trip over his toy on the way to your midnight snack. Other creative ways to maximize storage space are building a platform into your guestroom where you can store your things while keeping it usable and installing baseboard drawers in the bathroom and kitchen. And speaking of kitchens, a kitchen island with drawers or an extra refrigerator can also create a lot of storage opportunities.

We’ve made room to store everything; now wouldn’t it be nice to also cut down on cleaning time? Let’s start with the kitchen. If you have a big family, most likely you feel like you’re constantly loading and unloading the dishwasher and taking out the trash. Now that you have the space, why not think about installing another dishwasher? And how about installing chutes in your kitchen for trash and recycling that funnel straight into the garage? On to the bathroom: One of the hardest things to do is remove that soap residue from the glass wall of your shower. Well, it’s not hard at all if you build a walk-in shower without a glass wall. And I want to leave you with two words: baseboard vacuum.

Now that all the practical stuff is taken care of, here are some remodels that will do more than help you keep up with the Joneses; they will help you run laps around them. First of all, do you have an attic? Why not turn it into a pillow room where your kids can have the best slumber parties ever, and you can use as a refuge to meditate, watch a movie, or curl up with one of the books from your stairway bookshelf. Speaking of bookshelves, if you install bookshelves on the door to one of your rooms, it will look like you have a hidden room. And if you have a really tall ceiling, you can stretch a hammock across it and swap out the ceiling above for a star-gazing sunroof.

Murfey Construction would love to help make your house more spacious, easier to maintain, and more enjoyable. For years we have built lifestyles. For more information on how we can help you with creative remodeling ideas to enhance yours, log onto